Domino 8.5
Domino 8.5 is getting a huge refresh too, and that's not just the HTTP task work required to serve these new Web capabilities. How about a new attachment management capability that strips mail attachments as they appear in mail.box, and stores them in encrypted form on the server's file system, passing on an internal pointer only to the mail file?

This offers a great value for overstressed mail servers and overstressed Admins. As there will be no attachments stored in mail files, mail file size (the NSF file) will be smaller, speeding compaction and mail delivery. This feature will be optional, and as it happens entirely below the API level is totally transparent to everything else. Local replicas will still contain the attachments, if non-truncated replication is used.

More ch-ch-changes
As we commented last year when we noted the new LotusScript NotesDirectory class in Notes 8, the Domino Directory is to be opened up. You'll still need a configuration directory to describe the infrastructure, but the person and group data can be entirely outside Domino. Active Directory is the first target for this integration, with more to follow.

And finally, the ID file is to go, well, almost. Master copies of ID files will be stored on the server, information will be passed from the client machine OS-level logon to identify users, and ID files will be passed back to clients from the server as required, meaning that problems with password resetting, multiple copies of ID files, and recertifying ID files should become a thing of the past.

A SAPpy story
But that's not all for the Notes and Domino story. There's a whole new collaboration with SAP, called Atlantic, to take Notes and SAP integration to an entirely new level.

Using the Notes 8 collaborative capabilities, the first release will have support for workflows and reporting. IBM Global Services and SAP business partners will be able to customise it to generate new applications . It's not really clear how far down the SAP food chain this will reach.

There were a number of questions about how much of this is really new given that Notes has had an SAP connector for more that ten years now, and there were a number of SAP connection additions in Notes 7. The answer appears to be that this is all-new and is a full on-the-screen composite app integration, going well beyond what has been done before.

The demo showed an email connected directly to SAP data which was displayed in a sidebar panel. Atlantic's first release will be in 4Q 2008.

One last thing on Notes: It was also announced that Notes 8.5 and Symphony, of which more will be discussed in a follow-on article, will run and be supported on Ubuntu.

So what else was announced? Stay tuned next week.

Chris Stoner, a.k.a. Green Jellybean, is an R4 and R5 Principal Certified Lotus Professional. She can be reached at green_jellybean@bookideas.com. Chris is better known as her alias, GreenJellybean, which is the nickname for her green Toyota RAV4.